Crossroads Republic

The Nigerian superstar bandleader Fela Anikulapo-Kuti hosted a covert summit meeting in the summer of 1977. He received an extended visit from Lester Bowie, the mercurial trumpeter of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Their time together went unheralded, a private conversation in the midst of what may have been the most tumultuous period in Fela's tumultuous life. It is surely one of the more peculiar encounters in the history of black music: the African American and the African, the jazz instigator and the Afrobeat agitator, the doctor and the Chief Priest, the playboy and the polygamist, the scout and the dissident—both down and out, both uprooted and broke. They parleyed not on a stage but in a smoky hotel room.

Bowie, who'd once proclaimed that "the only good school for a musician is the road," was famously peripatetic; in addition to jazz groups, he'd played with army bands, carnival bands, marching bands, and funk bands, toured with blues and R&B hitmakers (including Albert King, Little Milton, Jackie Wilson, and Fontella Bass), and even played circus trumpet with an outfit called Leon Claxton's Harlem Review. A few years earlier, he told an interviewer that he aimed to play in the widest variety of circumstances he could. "It broadens you," he explained. Shifting the scene forces you to find out "what works and what doesn't . . . I've tried to play in just about any kind of situation. I could play with a bus. A motorcycle. A baby crying. You learning how to deal with all these different sounds. It's all about sound. You don't play bebop licks with a truck going down a highway, you have to have something that works." But, in his first trip to Africa, Bowie took on a unique challenge: to figure out what fit with Fela's tight-knit hybrid of James Brown, modal jazz, and high life. To deal with the sounds of Lagos in the midst of the perverse and fleeting euphoria of the oil boom. Months later, you could hear the traces, as a string of LPs appeared: Sorrow, Tears, and Blood; Palm Wine Sound; No Agreement; Dog Eat Dog; I Go Shout Plenty; Colonial Mentality. Even on the tunes where the solos were taken by Tunde Williams (the regular trumpeter in Fela's band, Africa '70), Bowie is listed on the jacket as "Guest Artiste." Sometimes there's even a hint of editorial comment, as when Ghariokwu Lemi's hand-drawn cover for the LP of Stalemate notes the participation of the "Guest Artist on Trumpet, Lester Bowie (a good Afro-American)."

Lester Bowie, Bracknell Jazz Festival, U.K., July 3, 1982. Courtesy of David Corio

In the time when order had not yet been established on earth, Orunmila came down from the sky to see how things were progressing. He was met with a barrage of questions and complaints from the orishas, human beings, and animals, who were all clamoring to know their rightful place in the world. The inimitable Eshu, trickster, mischief-maker, walking contradiction—the orisha with the biggest wooden stick, but a creature so small he had to stand on tiptoe to put salt in the soup—made a proposition: Orunmila should present each creature with a simple question, to which he or she must give a direct response. The answer would determine the creature's destiny and proper circumstance.

Orunmila found this an excellent suggestion, and went about questioning the creatures of the world, one by one. He asked the guinea fowl, "Do you want to wear a cord around your neck?" "No," said the bird, and so to this day it roams the yard without being tied or bound. Some animals were disdainful or petulant. "Do you want to eat from the ground?" the giraffe was asked, and when she scoffed at the suggestion, Orunmila caused her neck to stretch and condemned her to reach up into the trees for food. The horse, when asked whether he would carry a load, sneered, "Who's going to make me do...